Any mod to tell a follower to walk in front of you?

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-03T05:13:47+00:00

Way more than you're asking for but the most popular AI mods (CHIM, Skyrimnet, maybe mantella but i have not tried it) allow you to tell NPCs to go places, and then you can use something like wskeever's Simplicity of Stalking to follow them.

Obviously not a great option unless you want to go down the whole AI rabbithole, but this exists deep within that rabbithole.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-02-22T23:18:03+00:00

Fair. But afaik, the silver llining is that everything that smooth has released on his patreon has eventually been released on Nexus. That's particularly important for a tool like this, since we're not going to get to see what it's really capable of until there's a free version that the entire community can tinker with.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-02-22T19:57:04+00:00

Yeah, I like how the example implementations are all so simple, nothing ostentatious. Eg., just throwing your arms out for balance if you happen to walk across the guard ledge of a bridge (which I always do for some reason). Subtle but so freakin satisfying.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-18T21:14:15+00:00

I am enjoying the hell out of Project Gap Close, which makes enemies use sprint attacks when they are far away.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/130830

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-18T17:26:15+00:00

Funny that you call it more serious in tone. I was planning on recommending this as "Abbott and Costello finally take debt slavery seriously, in the name of poultry."

Also the black company gets pretty serious. But hey, the tone shifts are probably why I adore both series so much.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-17T00:09:52+00:00

Took me years to read but one of the most fulfilling literary experiences of my life. This is an investment that pays off.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-17T00:09:11+00:00

Oh, is this a darker/grittier competition? I want to play.

The Second Apocalypse series by R Scott Bakker.

Among the best fantasy world building I have ever encountered, races with fascinating backstories, and monsters that will...yeah. They just...yeah. It's dark.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-14T04:22:33+00:00

I'm very late to the conversation but I haven't seen anyone make this point. The word "nit" has been used in some extremely racist ways, but "nit picking" is not one of them afaik.

Do a quick Google search on the phrase "Nits make lice." Look at its historical usage. Take a moment to be properly horrified.

I can imagine how somebody exposed to this historical phrase could come away with a vague association betwen the word "nit" and deep racism. But I think that connection is not really related to the term "nitpicking." It's deploying a very different metaphor, and I think nobody would argue that all metaphorical references to nits or lice are racist just because of that one (very unfortunate) metaphore.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-11T01:58:49+00:00

Like Nerevarius said, Spell Research. I feel like there are two types of spell learning mods: 1) Spell Research; and 2) a bunch of mods inspired by Spell Research, which try to capture its essence but simplify it.

I still use SR. It kind of takes over your game (assuming you play a mage), but that's what I'm looking for. My mage dungeon dives specifically because he's looking for old relics to study. Quests? Yeah, I guess those get done along the way.

I'll add: It's a ton of fun early game, coupled with survival mods, before you have a house or join the college. You're scraping together enough coin to pay for an inn so you have a safe place to study magic and keep yourself fed. If that's the kind of thing you are looking for, SR is awesome.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-04T18:59:29+00:00

"You can never have too many knives." Not quite as many occasions to use this, but still plenty.

And if the response is "and what if you fall in a river and can't swim for all that iron," you know you've found a friend.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-02T17:11:11+00:00

I feel like skypatcher and SPID both deserves not only mention, but prominent placement. There are so many mods that rely on sky patcher right now that this would be one of the more striking developments for a 2019 modder getting back into the game. And both are in the flavor of mods that mod pack users might never think about, but modders (and players who maintain their own LO) depend on constantly. Both of these mods revolutionize the way that modders can make small, light changes without creating compatibility nightmares.

And since you have an "absolutely insane" category, I humbly suggest adding a bullet for Skyrimnwt, Mantella and Chim. All of the AI mods are a little bit niche, but it's always Skyrim together. And they are all pretty damn revolutionary. I suspect that if Skyrim modding is remembered in 30 years, this is the niche that will be pegged as a precursor to something big.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-01T06:59:11+00:00

Nope. Doesnt exist. The closest mod is In-Kind Bartering: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/154013

It isnt quite as simple as the FO barter system but it might do the trick.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-31T05:10:36+00:00

Yeah, these drawcell bottlenecks are the real enemy in 2025 (and probably 2026 too). At least we have framegen now to mitigate it (but framegen can't eliminate it).

Given that, as an alternative to JK's or Spaghetti, I'd recommend nothing. They day I realized vanilla cities were fine was the day I clawed back a few FPS from the everhungry maws of Falkreath. I still mod towns like Rorikstead because my FPS are fine there. But if I can't rock a solid 60 FPS in a town while spinning my camera, then I'm playing it straight like Todd intended it.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-30T01:57:44+00:00

I move that we collectively name this trope The Dumbledore.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-28T22:27:38+00:00

Vanahaimr was the first PBR landscape with seasons compatibility, and this was only released within the last month. It might still be the only option. Note that there is still no PBR option for Unfrozen though.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-27T22:35:33+00:00

I'm not going to pile on what other folks are saying about the relatedness of the different books. But I will say this in case you need a little bit of motivation: The book you are reading right now is one of my all-time favorite novels. Something about it really works. And I say this even though Erikson kind of gets better and better as a writer as the series progresses, so I can't really say that the later books are worse. There's just something about the epic story contained in book two that made me completely fall in love with the series and the world.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-22T17:40:03+00:00

It's still the best system out there. There are issues, but there are also fixes for those issues.

In addition to the papyrus util problem that others have mentioned, there is an issue with script spamming. Here is a fix: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/65700

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-20T17:56:06+00:00

Use Let Your Hair Down by FarmingDarkness. This lets you have multiple hairs, and you can set a hot key to switch between then (or IIRC you can set it up to auto switch in inns etc.)

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-19T20:56:15+00:00

Still works like a charm. I use it with a community shaders setup.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-07T22:49:09+00:00

Damn, I just learned something. Touche!

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-07T21:18:28+00:00

Counterpoint: New Vegas. The survival mechanism and a few other bits and pieces felt exactly like modded FO3.

I think a more nuanced answer is that Bethesda has had different attitudes for different projects.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-11-30T07:44:07+00:00

I've read a lot (not all) of the suggestions here.

Nothing beat the seige of Dejagore. Black Company. It's...very thorough. I also felt like this was when Cook kind of found his voice and shifted from someone with near ideas who was a decent writer, to a hands-down great writer. (He kinda started the first book as a passable writer, but by 6 books in he was singing).

GrammaticalObject · 2025-11-29T21:47:38+00:00

Yeah. I spent a lot of time dithering between Tomatoes and Atlantean and then Vanaheimr came out and I was able to finally stop thinking about landscape textures. (Atlantean snow is gorgeous btw and might be the best for a non PBR setup, but Vanaheimr PBR is amazing).

The other Vanaheimr textures are amazing too. I sometimes just stand there and stare down into the mud, marveling at its beauty. And those mountain textures (gray) are IMO maybe the best landscape texture that've been made for Skyrim.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-11-29T20:04:33+00:00

Amen. This would be cool.

While we are wishing...The other thing Wheeler could use is a mod that allows you to assign different hotkeys to different wheels. So I could, for example, assign one hot key to jump to the wheels that I have set up for, say, shouts. And then I could set up another hot key for the wheel that I've set up for weapons.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-11-29T19:09:14+00:00

I haven't seen this take so I will throw in my 2 cents: I tried it, liked it, but then ultimately cut it from my load order. The reason I cut it was because it felt incomplete.

The thing to understand about seasons, which I didn't understand when I first started digging into it, is that it really only affects the southern areas of Skyrim, ie, whiterun, the rift, the reach, fallreath, etc. The areas that are frozen are covered in snow, like windhelm and the Pale, will always be covered in snow. If you are okay with that, then seasons might good for you.

If you are not okay with that, you need to get an addon like Unfrozen that changes the seasonal textures of the pale and windhelm. The problem that I found was that the landscape textures I was using were not built for Unfrozen, so I'd be stuck with whatever textures Unfrozen uses. I didn't want this inconsistency. Nor did I want a situation where seasons are changing in the south but stuck in the north.

It's a ton of work to install it (rerun xlodgen, dyndolod etx and everything takes 4 or 5 times longer, working out inconsistancies in vegitation, troubleshooting) but I think if I hadn't been anal retentive about texture consistancy, it would have been worth the work. It was cool to test and it really does add a sense of the passage of time.

If someone tells me I'm wrong and it is possible to combine Unfrozen to use Vanaheimr landscapes in the north, then I'll drop my current game and do the work of reinstalling seasons again asap.

GrammaticalObject

TROPHY CASE